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This weekend I was a guest speaker at ReasonCon One. This was the first ReasonCon, held in Hickory, NC.

I was invited to come and talk about “Analogies.” The main Keynote was Dr. Richard Carrier, who spoke on the historicity of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. The speaker sessions were free and open to the public. Only the social events had fees. The lecture room held 250, and was packed, with overflow guests standing in the doorway of the adjoining room. The turnout was stunning.

Hey gang, Natalie Reed — a recent guest on Godless Bitches — is a member of two distinct minority communities. She is both atheist and transgendered. Those communities apparently, at best, share an uneasy alliance. Much like I’ve learned to expect that any remotely pro-feminism post here will receive vocal disapproval from many atheists, Natalie’s trans community has a number of anti-atheists who don’t think they should hold back from shouting indignantly at the godless.

Thus, her latest post, “God Does Not Love Trans People“, is guaranteed to get a pile of cranky comments from a bunch of members of one group crossing over into the atheist blogosphere. You see, it’s like this:

“Lately there have been a number of posts circulating throughout the trans blogosphere making statements to the effect that God loves and accepts His transgender children, and that being trans is not necessarily in conflict with being a religious believer, or even a Christian, Muslim or Jew. While I perfectly understand the motivation behind these posts, and why people feel such a strong need for this message, I nonetheless find it very deeply problematic, and kinda sorta feel a bit of a compelling need to address it. See, I honestly believe that religious faith is inherently dangerous and harmful, that we, the queer community, often are especially victimized by it, and especially ought to understand its potential harms, that the danger is an element of the underlying definition of religious faith itself rather than simply particular sects, beliefs or institutions based upon it, and that we are doing ourselves a pretty big disservice in constructing apologetics (or encouraging them) designed to ease the dissonance between our identities and the belief systems we hold dear.”

Go and give these commenters a warm welcome, won’t you? Be respectful  and please stay away if you’re the sort who just wants some other oppositional minority to pick on. But if you see any nonsensical claims about the godless and their habits rearing their ugly head, verily I say to you that you must smack them down with great gusto.